Table Of ContentThis study guide and/or material is not sponsored by, endorsed by, or affiliated with
Cisco Systems, Inc., Cisco®, Cisco Systems©, CCDA™, CCNA™, CCDP™,
CCNP™, CCIE™, or CCSI™. The Cisco Systems logo and the CCIE logo are
trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. in the United States and
certain other countries. All other trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners.
Copyright Notice
Copyright © 2017 Paul Browning. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, stored, or transmitted mechanically, electronically, optically, or by any
other means, including photocopying, without the prior written permission of the
author.
ISBN-13: 978-1548104856
ISBN-10: 154810485X
Published by: Reality Press Ltd.
Legal Notice
The advice in this book is designed to assist you in reaching the required standard for
the CCENT/ICND1 and CCNA exams. The labs are designed to illustrate various
learning points and are not suggested configurations to apply to a production network.
Please check all your configurations with a qualified Cisco professional. Many of the
commands, including debugs and clearing the IP routing table, can cause serious
performance issues on live networks.
Introduction to the 2 Edition
nd
It’s hard to believe that I wrote the first edition of this book in 2009.
Back then, the CCNA exam was mostly theory with a couple of labs thrown in. Scroll
forward eight years and the exam is mostly hands-on labs and practical questions with
some theory thrown in.
A hands-on lab manual was needed because there was a huge gap in the market for a
practical manual. Most CCNA books are very theory heavy with a few labs thrown in.
My CCNA study manuals Cisco CCNA Simplified and Cisco CCNA in 60 Days
addressed this problem by being very lab heavy. After feedback from my students, I felt
that most people would need an extra boost of practical experience for the CCNA exam.
In the CCNA exam, you can expect to be tested on the following hands-on scenarios:
1. Configure a lab according to specifications.
2. Troubleshoot and resolve a broken network or technology (e.g., ACL not
working).
3. Use show commands to determine an issue or configuration and answer
questions.
It gets even harder when you realize that you are not familiar with the topology and IP
addressing scheme, and you will see the clock counting down before your eyes. You
will be working on a router or switch emulator that only runs a limited number of IOS
commands so some of your shortcuts may not work, such as sh ip int brie instead of
show ip interface brief.
The goal of this lab manual is to get your hands-on skills way past the level required for
the CCNA exam so when it comes to exam day, you will find the lab scenarios a breeze.
I’ve had many of my students finish their exam with 30 minutes to spare because they
solved the scenarios so quickly! This is where you should aim to be.
The fact that you have this book in your hands means that you are studying for your
CCNA or CCENT exam or perhaps just want to polish your hands-on Cisco skills.
Whatever your reason, we admire you for putting the effort into improving your hands-
on ability.
We have marked the labs as either ICND1, ICND2, CCNA, or CCENT, but please do
double-check the syllabus before you take the exam. We have also rated each lab on a
scale of 1 to 10 for difficulty and have given you timings so you will know when you
are ready for the real thing.
Best of luck with your studies.
Paul Browning – CCNP
Farai Tafa – CCIE (RS & SP) 14811
About the Authors
Paul is the author of CCNA Simplified, which is one of the industry’s leading CCNA
study guides. He used to work for Cisco TAC but left in 2002 to start his own Cisco
training company in the UK. Paul has taught over 2,000 Cisco engineers with both his
classroom courses and online Cisco training site, www.howtonetwork.com.
Paul lives in Australia with his wife and daughters.
Farai is a dual CCIE in both Routing and Switching and Service Provider. He currently
works for one of the world’s largest telecom companies as a network engineer. He has
written workbooks for the CCNA, CCNP, and Cisco Security exams.
Farai lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.
How to Use This Book
First, this book is designed to cement the theory you have read in your CCNA study
guide. If you don’t have a good-quality study guide at the moment, then we highly
recommend one of our CCNA study guides—CCNA Simplified or Cisco CCNA in 60
Days—which you can purchase on Amazon in printed or Kindle format. CCNA
Simplified is targeted at those who want to approach the exams at a leisurely pace, while
CCNA in 60 Days is available to those who want to pass the exams quickly and need a
well-defined structure to follow as opposed to working on their own study plan.
The goal is to dramatically improve your hands-on knowledge and speed. We don’t have
the space here to cover the theory at all, so please refer to your CCNA study guide to get
a good understanding of the learning points behind each lab. Every lab is designed to
cover a particular theory issue, such as configuration requirements of RIP passive
interfaces. As the labs progress, common commands such as how to create VLANs or
add IP addresses to interfaces will not be repeated. This not only saves space but after a
couple of labs, you should really know how to do these commands. I am telling you this
because I had a few complaints from readers about not spelling out how to add an IP
address to an interface, but by the time you are configuring advanced access lists, you
really should know how to do that without being prompted!
If you want to take the two-exam route, Section One of the book covers the ICND1
topics, while Section Two presents the ICND2 topics. Each lab is followed by a solution
so you can check yours against ours. Please bear in mind that Cisco has some subjects
listed in both the ICND1 and ICND2 sections, such as native VLANs. Cisco also
reserves the right to ask questions on the exam that are not even in the syllabus. I’m
mentioning this because I sometimes get an e-mail from an angry student blaming me
for the fact that something came up on the exam that I didn’t cover.
Cisco also inserts test questions into the exam that are not marked, so don’t sweat too
much if something out of the ordinary appears. I took a Cisco switching exam once and
an EIGRP routing question appeared on the screen! Do your best to answer it and move
on.
As you progress through the labs, you will be given less and less configuration
commands to follow, and instead you will simply refer to steps from previous labs. This
is to cement the learning for you as well as to save space and time. The ICND1 and
ICND2 sections finish with challenge labs but with a running configuration instead of a
full solution.
Look at the challenge and configure as much as you can without looking at the solution.
After you finish, check your solution against ours. Sometimes there is more than one
way to configure a particular technology, so don’t kick yourself if your solution works
but is different than ours.
Hands-on Options
The best solution is to have your own home lab featuring Cisco routers and switches that
you can cable up. Cisco tests you on the 15.X IOS release and the 2960 model of switch.
There are various companies selling kits on eBay so check those out. You can resell
them after your exam.
GNS3 is a free router emulator. You can drag and drop routers and switches to easily
create different topologies. You need to supply your own IOS and these are only legally
available via Cisco, so this may prove a challenge to many students. Try it out for
yourself though.
Router simulators are available from a small number of companies. These do not run
Cisco IOS but a programmer has created a number of commands that you can try out. I
do not recommend that you use these because they aren’t able to create flexible
topologies and they don’t act in the same way actual devices do.
A few companies offer remote racks of live equipment. The number is fairly limited due
to the costs of hosting the equipment, and of course somebody needs to physically attend
to the site at times to recover it in some cases. Cisco offers a live lab solution, and there
are two full racks available 24/7 to all members of https://www.howtonetwork.com.
The last and best option for most students is Packet Tracer, which is now a free
download from Cisco. It’s still an emulator but you can drag IP phones, routers,
switches, and other devices to create fairly complex topologies. It acts in a very similar
way to actual equipment but doesn’t offer all of the available commands. It’s good
enough for the CCNA exam level but be aware that not all syllabus topics are supported,
for example, extended VLANs.
If you do not like router output interrupting you as you configure the labs, then please
add the logging synchronous command to the console 0 line as shown below:
Router#config t
Router(config)#line console 0
Router(config-line)#logging synchronous
A Note about Interfaces
We have configured all of these labs on either our own Cisco equipment or the live racks
at https://www.howtonetwork.com. Our interfaces match the diagrams for each lab, but
please note that your equipment may have different interface numbers depending on the
model. If you plugged your WIC card into a different slot, it may be numbered 0/0, 0/1,
1/0, 0/0/1, and so on. The best way to find your interface number is to issue the show ip
interface brief command, and then mark it on the diagram. Even better, draw your own
network diagram.
We have done our best to prepare you for the real world of Cisco internetworking. To
this end, we have abbreviated many of the commands. Nobody in the real world types
config terminal to enter configuration mode on a router, but rather conf t usually. In the
exam, you will be using a router simulator though, so please understand the full version
of the command just in case the shortened version doesn’t work.
Are You Exam Ready?
The labs here are designed to prepare you well beyond the exam level and, of course,
give you a strong foundation for real-world Cisco internetworking. But they are just the
beginning. Before you take the actual exam, ensure that you can complete all the labs
without looking at the solutions. Then change up the IP addressing scheme, change the
interface types (if applicable), and add more routers or switches. Read up on the
configuration and show commands using Cisco IOS documentation.
You should be very familiar with all the ways that the technology can be broken, the
relevant show command(s) to establish whether your theory is correct, and, of course,
how to fix any issues and finally prove that the scenario is working with relevant debug
or show commands, or even a packet sniffer.
The sign of a student who I know will pass the exam is having a real interest in
unpacking how the protocol works using theory, labs, and practice exams. Once you can
do this you can easily plan, configure, verify, and troubleshoot anything in the syllabus.
In fact, as soon as you look at a topology, you will know which commands should be
present and which routes should be in the table (for example) on which router.
Help—My Lab Isn’t Working
A big part of being a network engineer is troubleshooting. Most of the mistakes you will
make will result from mistyping stuff or misreading the instructions. It’s okay because
this is part of the learning process. Double-check your configurations and then the
solution.
Please do bear in mind that different IOS versions support different commands. Packet
Tracer doesn’t support everything in the CCNA syllabus (such as extended VLANS) so
no matter how hard you try, the commands just won’t work. GNS3 isn’t live equipment
so the clock rate command won’t work as it does on live equipment. The Telnet lines on
most equipment go from 0 to 15, but on GNS3 it’s 0 to 903. If you try to configure a
local password on the Telnet lines before adding a password on GNS3, you will get
1,001 error messages like the ones below:
% Login disabled on line 999, until ‘password’ is set
% Login disabled on line 1000, until ‘password’ is set
% Login disabled on line 1001, until ‘password’ is set
If things aren’t working for you the way you expect, then check your configurations.
Check that the commands are supported on your platform (via the Cisco IOS feature
set/platform tool) or just Google it. Try the lab out on PT and then GNS3, and if all else
fails, get some time on live equipment if you can. Nothing beats it.
For most of the labs we used live equipment, so some of your options and outputs may
differ. Some commands may not be available to you and some of our show runs may
differ slightly because Cisco enables/disables features depending on the IOS release and
platform. If you see some slight differences, don’t let this trouble you too much,
especially if you choose to use Packet Tracer, which offers a limited set of commands
and debugs.
Leave the lab and come back to it later with a fresh pair of eyes. Get a colleague to
check it over or post the issue on a forum as a last resort.
101 CCNA Labs Video Course
After writing this book, I had a large number of requests for a video course with me
explaining the scenario and talking students through the solutions. I eventually did this
and have put it on Udemy. The course matches most of this book with a few changes
here and there. You certainly don’t need to use it but if you learn best by watching an
instructor, then the link is below. I’ve added a coupon so that you can get access for $10,
which covers the cost of the video production software and the weeks of work that went
into creating it.
https://www.udemy.com/101-cisco-ccna-labs/
Enter the coupon code below at checkout and the price will drop to $10:
101CCNA
Or use the direct URL below:
https://www.udemy.com/101-cisco-ccna-labs/?couponCode=101CCNA
Once again, you don’t need the video course because I’ve designed this book as a stand-
alone product, but if you want some extra teaching and have 10 bucks to spare, then
check it out. Over 5,000 students have used it at the time of writing this new edition.
Please drop me a review if you like it.
You can also post questions and requests on that platform, and there is a certificate of
completion.
